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To give a bit of background, I was born with an incurable and hereditary kidney disorder called Alport syndrome, which basically degrades and destroys the blood vessels in the lining of your kidneys such that they're progressively getting worse at filtering toxins out of my blood. (As an added bonus of this disorder, I'm also partially deaf in both ears and my eyes are unstable.)
My older brother also suffers from this disorder. His kidneys failed in 2002, eight years before the ACA was put into place, and he had to go on dialysis - first a home dialysis machine, then an inpatient procedure, neither of which were particularly different in terms of cost - before Medicare kicked in, those procedures cost over $16,000 a month. My parents nearly went bankrupt trying to pay his medical bills with gross income over $100,000, and at one point they even stopped paying them completely. Things got a little better when he went back to college (they'd failed while he was in his sophomore year, originally) - he was covered by Medicaid for a while as well as Medicare, but he couldn't work more than a handful of hours in order to stay on both.
He's literally only able to get insurance at all because his employer has to offer it, and at least with a Clinton administration he would've had the option of getting an individual plan if he wanted to change jobs at some point and the next one didn't offer health benefits - because at least she wouldn't get rid of the exchanges.
I was about to graduate from Ohio State in May with dual master's degrees in public-sector fields (an MPA and a master's in urban planning). I had aspirations: move back up to Cleveland, get a job with the government of my hometown of Cleveland Heights, pay off loans and get a decent exchange plan so at least I'm not instantly consigned to medical bankruptcy the minute my kidney function finally falls under the failure threshold, and see where my life takes me in the long run.
Now we've got a President who's vowed to repeal the ACA, with a House and Senate who have vowed to repeal the ACA, and both him and I will have to go back to that same old system where our families Goddamn near go bankrupt just to try and keep us alive. He needs to take horrendously expensive anti-rejection drugs for the rest of his life; I'll have to keep taking ACE inhibitors, then go on dialysis, *then* take those same drugs.
My most common thought in the past day has been "how the fuck could 48% of this electorate just not care about this?" My second most common thought? "What the hell am I going to do?"
I'm not going to be able to find insurance that isn't Medicare in the foreseeable future, any country with a sane health care sector that I could emigrate to is probably going to auto-reject any avenue I try to take for emigration because my medical cost burden will be enormous, and odds are high that the job market here is not going to be favorable for someone who's going to have less than a year of total intern experience, to say nothing about the fact that governments are going to have to shrink down again thanks to those thrice-damned tax cuts.
I went to grad school so I could make a better life for myself, in the hopes that the ACA would still be there and keep my life from becoming a living hell. Now it's going to get dismantled by people who claim to believe in the teachings of Christ while pissing all over the less fortunate.
Why the hell doesn't anyone in the media or general public seem to care about this particular consequence of the election?
Why doesn't this country want me?
My older brother also suffers from this disorder. His kidneys failed in 2002, eight years before the ACA was put into place, and he had to go on dialysis - first a home dialysis machine, then an inpatient procedure, neither of which were particularly different in terms of cost - before Medicare kicked in, those procedures cost over $16,000 a month. My parents nearly went bankrupt trying to pay his medical bills with gross income over $100,000, and at one point they even stopped paying them completely. Things got a little better when he went back to college (they'd failed while he was in his sophomore year, originally) - he was covered by Medicaid for a while as well as Medicare, but he couldn't work more than a handful of hours in order to stay on both.
He's literally only able to get insurance at all because his employer has to offer it, and at least with a Clinton administration he would've had the option of getting an individual plan if he wanted to change jobs at some point and the next one didn't offer health benefits - because at least she wouldn't get rid of the exchanges.
I was about to graduate from Ohio State in May with dual master's degrees in public-sector fields (an MPA and a master's in urban planning). I had aspirations: move back up to Cleveland, get a job with the government of my hometown of Cleveland Heights, pay off loans and get a decent exchange plan so at least I'm not instantly consigned to medical bankruptcy the minute my kidney function finally falls under the failure threshold, and see where my life takes me in the long run.
Now we've got a President who's vowed to repeal the ACA, with a House and Senate who have vowed to repeal the ACA, and both him and I will have to go back to that same old system where our families Goddamn near go bankrupt just to try and keep us alive. He needs to take horrendously expensive anti-rejection drugs for the rest of his life; I'll have to keep taking ACE inhibitors, then go on dialysis, *then* take those same drugs.
My most common thought in the past day has been "how the fuck could 48% of this electorate just not care about this?" My second most common thought? "What the hell am I going to do?"
I'm not going to be able to find insurance that isn't Medicare in the foreseeable future, any country with a sane health care sector that I could emigrate to is probably going to auto-reject any avenue I try to take for emigration because my medical cost burden will be enormous, and odds are high that the job market here is not going to be favorable for someone who's going to have less than a year of total intern experience, to say nothing about the fact that governments are going to have to shrink down again thanks to those thrice-damned tax cuts.
I went to grad school so I could make a better life for myself, in the hopes that the ACA would still be there and keep my life from becoming a living hell. Now it's going to get dismantled by people who claim to believe in the teachings of Christ while pissing all over the less fortunate.
Why the hell doesn't anyone in the media or general public seem to care about this particular consequence of the election?
Why doesn't this country want me?
